A Guide to Fairly and Randomly Selecting People for Citizens’ Assemblies

Imagine you have a problem you need to solve. This problem has no clear answer, and you have many trade-offs to consider. There are also many people who will be affected by the decision you make, and there is no clear consensus about the right thing to do.

You decide to gather these people together to discuss options, weigh the pros and cons, and craft a plan. The challenge is there are many people that need to be consulted and not enough time to work with everyone in a meaningful way.

Enter: the Civic Lottery.

A Civic Lottery is a process to fairly and randomly select a representative group of people within a specific population to learn about and discuss a problem and develop clear and useful recommendations about how to address it.